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Fast Track

The Washington Metro’s $3 billion new Silver Line, set to finally begin service later this summer, could have surprising political consequences—tipping Loudoun County, long the key to victory in Virginia, firmly into the Democratic camp. “Like other suburbs around the country, [Loudoun County] has urbanized, and in doing so it’s become much more fertile ground for Democrats,” Dante Chinni writes. In that way, the Silver Line is just the latest iteration of a story that that’s been going on for more than a century: a major transportation change both responding to and fostering dense urban growth. These transformations begin with a sudden, often visually striking, change in the physical landscape of cities. The following photos, of streets upended, streetcars rerouted and excavation blasts gone awry, foreshadow the larger changes that followed long after the dynamite smoke cleared.

Two men survey construction at Washington, D.C.’s central metro station, Metro Center, in November 1973. The Washington Metro Area Transit Authority approved plans for a rapid transit system in 1968, and construction began in 1969. A Washington Post article at the time described the scope of the project. “By 1990, the station will be used daily by half as many people as now ride Washington’s entire bus system,” the article said. The Post also reported on the moving of underground utilities and a maze of 120 telephone conduits to make way for the station. “It is part of one of the biggest concentrations of telephone lines you will find anywhere in the world,” an engineering consultant for Metro told the newspaper.